CUE Labs, the company behind the widely adopted open-source configuration language CUE, has officially emerged from stealth with the launch of its Configuration Control Plane, a new system designed to make enterprise configuration a strategic asset rather than a source of risk. The company also announced more than $10 million in early funding led by Sequoia Capital and OSS Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Dell Technologies Capital, and several notable angel investors.
Configuration errors have long been a significant source of costly disruptions, leading to flight groundings, operational outages at financial institutions and hospitals, data breaches, and multibillion-dollar market losses. These problems have only intensified as organizations deploy increasingly complex AI systems composed of interdependent models, data pipelines, and autonomous agents. This complexity has magnified the need for robust and verifiable configuration systems that can prevent cascading errors across infrastructure.
CUE Labs’ Configuration Control Plane enables organizations to manage, audit, and validate configurations across their technology stack—from build-time settings to runtime payloads—allowing the teams to anticipate the impact of configuration changes before they occur. The system’s first component, the Central Registry, is already publicly available, offering a library of verified schemas that enable secure and reusable configuration modules across teams and environments.
Founded by Marcel van Lohuizen and Paul Jolly, CUE Labs builds upon years of foundational work in large-scale system orchestration. Van Lohuizen, who created CUE, previously spent more than 18 years at Google, where he co-created Borg—the company’s influential cluster management system that served as the basis for Kubernetes—and developed Borg’s orchestration tooling and the GCL configuration language, both still integral to Google’s infrastructure today.
CUE Labs’ open-source foundation has steadily gained traction across various industries, with active users and contributors from organizations such as Microsoft, Fastly, Alibaba, Elastic, Mercari, and Docomo. Its declarative approach to configuration is already being utilized in diverse sectors, including e-commerce, telecommunications, IoT, energy, and cloud computing.
The company’s mission is to help enterprises move from configuration chaos to control, enabling reliability, compliance, and scalability in an era of rapidly evolving AI-driven systems.
KEY QUOTES:
“Configuration is one of the least understood and often costly problems in modern software systems, and in a world that heavily relies on AI-agents, CUE can provide the necessary guardrails to keep systems stable.”
Bill Coughran, Partner at Sequoia Capital
“In the twenty years of dealing with large scale configurations, we have learned about anti-patterns, common mistakes, what prevents configurations from scaling, and what causes outages. CUE is the culmination of those learnings and helps users to avoid these pitfalls.”
Marcel van Lohuizen, Co-Founder of CUE Labs
